FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his family endure a season of hatred.

The self-styled “Resistance” to the Trump Administration is by its nature offensive to many participants in our democracy because it portrays our duly-elected President as some sort of tyrant. Lately it appears not just offensive but dangerous.

This week the head of the Federal Communications Commission appeared on Fox News to discuss his effort to repeal misguided 2015 rules that imposed 1930s telephone regulations on the Internet. According to Fox:

FCC Chairman
Ajit Pai
on Monday blasted net neutrality activists who protested outside his home with signs directed at his children, saying the demonstration “crosses a line.”

The protests followed Pai saying last week that he would follow through on his pledge to repeal Obama-era Internet regulations.

The move set up a showdown with consumer groups, but the backlash recently reached Pai’s own home -- with activists putting up cardboard signs that ask if this is the world he wants his children to “inherit.” One sign says, “They will come to know the truth. Dad murdered democracy in cold blood.”

Speaking of crossing lines, unhinged critics on Twitter have attacked Mr. Pai’s Indian heritage and wished death by AIDS and cancer upon him and his family. Mr. Pai’s Chief of Staff, Matthew Berry, has posted some of the appalling messages.

According to Variety, Mr. Pai’s wife “has received threatening messages at her workplace, according to an FCC source.” April Glaser has more in Slate:

It wasn’t the first time that activists apparently showed up near his home. Menacing, handwritten signs also appeared in Pai’s local neighborhood, including one that named his children and the question, “How will they ever look you in the eye again?” In May, in what appeared to be a coordinated campaign by the advocacy group Popular Resistance, people left flyers on Pai’s neighbors’ doors that included his picture, age, and weight. Unfortunately, such attacks aren’t new to Pai, who has endured a steady stream of racist, lewd, and threatening backlash since April, when he introduced his intention to gut the net neutrality rules.

Variety offers some reassurance that not everybody who disagrees with Mr. Pai is insulting him and threatening violence:

Public internet advocates who oppose the FCC’s pending action condemned the harassing messages.

Jessica Rosenworcel,
an FCC commissioner who favors the current rules and opposes Pai’s proposal, said on Twitter that the harassment was “unacceptable. Under any circumstances.”

Craig Aaron, the president of Free Press, an advocacy group that supports diverse media ownership, told The Washington Post: “We condemn any racist comments or harassing messages sent to the chairman of the FCC. We don’t think there is any place for that in the debate.” Aaron said his group was not involved in the sign-posting incident at Pai’s home.

Let’s hope Mr. Aaron means it this time. In March his organization published a screed called, “The Resistance Must Be Digitized.” The online rant referred to “our nation’s authoritarian new president” and claimed that “people are resisting the neo-fascist agenda President Trump is unleashing on our nation.” The document went on to claim that the President and Mr. Pai share a “disdain for popular democracy, privacy rights, the truth and the poor.” It also claimed that carrying out the President’s agenda at the FCC would mean “intensifying surveillance of our communities and cracking down on political dissent.”

As irresponsible as such language is, it’s also ridiculous. The resisters are casting as a fundamental free speech right what was essentially a gift to tech lobbyists. Companies like Netflix, which by some measures generates more than a third of all North American Internet traffic, and Google, which also generates significant traffic via its YouTube video service, didn’t want to pay market rates to companies like Verizon for moving that traffic. Essentially, Silicon Valley wanted to cut its phone bill and it persuaded President Obama to instruct his supposedly independent telecom regulators to make it happen. In early 2015 the Journal reported how it went down:

In November, the White House’s top economic adviser dropped by the Federal Communications Commission with a heads-up for the agency’s chairman,
Tom Wheeler.
President
Barack Obama
was ready to unveil his vision for regulating high-speed Internet traffic.

The specifics came four days later in an announcement that blindsided officials at the FCC. Mr. Obama said the Internet should be overseen as a public utility... The president’s words swept aside more than a decade of light-touch regulation of the Internet and months of work by Mr. Wheeler toward a compromise.

The Journal went on to describe “an unusual, secretive effort inside the White House,” led by two aides acting “like a parallel version of the FCC itself” and pushing the agenda of the tech industry.

The plan was sold as a solution to problems that did not exist--hypothetical cases of Internet service providers blocking content they don’t like.

Predictably, it hasn’t worked out well for consumers. As Mr. Pai has noted, investment in broadband networks has declined for two years in a row for the first time in the history of the Internet, not counting recessions.

All Mr. Pai and his colleagues are doing is restoring the freedom that existed until 2015 and allowed the Internet to become a jewel of the U.S. economy and a benefit to the world. But regardless of one’s views on the best way to encourage investment in broadband networks, he doesn’t deserve this appalling treatment. Here’s hoping a few principled Democrats will start loudly condemning the nasty people of the Resistance.